Has murder become the new porn?

Which widely shared, violent video on social media should I write about? The tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk or the gruesome murder of Iryna Zarutska?

Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative media figure, was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed as she sat on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last month. Videos of both deaths have been widely circulated online, notably X, and have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

The CCTV footage of Zarutska’s murder was the first to go viral. Watching her final moments left me in a state of shock. My instant reaction was that this was a video that I did not need to see.

Unfortunately, thousands of people on social media disagreed. They assumed it was their public duty to share the graphic details of Zarutska’s murder with as many others as possible. It’s been just as deflating to see their hypocritical tone in doing so. Warning of ‘graphic footage’ in the straplines, these posters nonetheless felt compelled to share said footage with the world.

There is something deeply unsettling with the assumption that it is okay to share a recording of an individual’s harrowing final moments. Sadly, it seems that the pornification of violence has become deeply entrenched in contemporary society. As Dr Simon Cottee, a criminologist at the University of Kent who has written extensively on the subject, put it to me, ‘we live in an age of the murder mega-spectacle, where the most horrifying violence is visible to us in the form of grisly viral snuff films that are everywhere online – to be shared, liked, politicised, memed’. According to Cottee, no one truly understands the impact of mass exposure to violent videos on the ‘human soul and society’.

There is an important ethical question as to whether we have the right to watch and share these videos. As a free-speech absolutist, I struggle with this issue. But, ultimately, I believe it is ethically wrong to participate in the transmission of violence and death. After carrying out research on ISIS’s gruesome execution videos in particular, Cottee came to a similar conclusion. He notes that, when he was watching them, he crossed an ‘ethical line – by violating the dignity and privacy of the victims who were humiliated, tortured and killed on camera and for an audience’.

The violation of Zarutska’s and Kirk’s dignity and privacy in their final moments is disturbing for anyone who believes in the sanctity of human life. Equally disturbing is how the sharing of the suffering of others encourages a voyeuristic interest in death. Sharing footage of murders online has not only normalised inhumane and barbaric behaviour, it has also desensitised us to it.

It was, of course, important that information about Zarutska’s murder in particular was communicated as widely as possible. But this could have been achieved through sharing pictures of her and of her alleged killer.

There is a further connection between the video of Zarutska’s brutal slaughter and that of Kirk’s murder. The indifference of the passengers on that train as Zarutska’s life ebbed away from her is arguably the most shocking feature of the video. The same callous insensitivity has also been a feature of the response to Kirk’s assassination. Yet while the people who sat near Zarutska were simply cowards, people online have actively revelled in the death of Kirk.

These are the tragic consequences of the widespread pornification of violence. In Kirk’s case, we have seen ‘progressives’ celebrating the murder of an adversary. And in Zarutska’s case, we’ve witnessed the callous indifference of the millions who have spectated on her death. These are signs of a society in trouble.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.